Video Nasty: The Moral Apocalypse in Koji Suzuki’s Ring

Although overshadowed by its filmic adaptations (Hideo Nakata, 1998 and Gore Verbinski, 2002), Koji Suzuki’s novel Ring (1991) is at the heart of the international explosion of interest in Japanese horror. This article seeks to explore Suzuki’s overlooked text. Unlike the film versions, the novel is more explicitly focused on the line between self-preservation and self-sacrifice, critiquing the ease with which the former is privileged over the latter. In the novel then, the horror of Sadako’s curse raises questions about the terrors of moral obligation: the lead protagonist (Asakawa) projects the guilt he feels over his self-interested actions, envisaging them as an all-consuming apocalypse

The technologies of isolation: apocalypse and self in Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Kairo

In this investigation of the Japanese film Kairo, I contemplate how the horrors present in the film relate to the issue of self, by examining a number of interlocking motifs. These include thematic foci on disease and technology which are more intimately and inwardly focused that the film's conclusion first appears to suggest. The true horror here, I argue, is ontological: centred on the self and its divorcing from the exterior world, especially founded in an increased use of and reliance on communicative technologies. I contend that these concerns are manifested in Kairo by presenting the spread of technology as disease-like, infecting the city and the individuals who are isolated and imprisoned by their urban environment. Finally, I investigate the meanings of the apocalypse, expounding how it may be read as hopeful for the future rather than indicative of failure or doom

Monstrous Adaptations:Generic and Thematic Mutations in Horror Film

The fifteen groundbreaking essays contained in Monstrous adaptations: Generic and thematic mutations in horror film address the concept of adaptation in relation to horror cinema. Adaptation is not only a key cultural practice and strategy for filmmakers, but it is also a theme of major importance within horror cinema as a whole. Horror film s history is full of adaptations that have drawn from fiction or folklore, or that have assumed the shape of remakes of pre-existing films. However, the horror genre itself also abounds with its own myriad transformations and transmutations. This collection of essays many written by leading authorities in the discipline of cinema studies demonstrates the significance of the adaptative process in the theory, practice and thematics of horror film. The essays within this volume engage with an impressive range of horror texts, from the earliest silent horror films by Thomas Edison and Jean Epstein through to important contemporary phenomena, such as the western appropriation of Japanese horror motifs. Classic works by Alfred Hitchcock, David Cronenberg, and Abel Ferrara receive cutting-edge re-examination, as do unjustly neglected works by Mario Bava, Guillermo del Toro and Stan Brakhage. The collection also offers significant insights into cinematic adaptations of horror literature by H. P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe, and Clive Barker, as do mythical figures such as the Gorgon and some of the most pervasive urban legends